Emerging presidential candidates will depend on word of mouth marketing

By Ted Wright February 11, 2019

By Ted Wright

At the core of Word of Mouth Marketing is the crafting of the story that you’d like each of or brand advocates to share with their friends.

Over the last 18 years of focusing only on Word of Mouth, we’ve found that a story has to have three components to be shared between an advocate and their audience. It has to be “interesting” so that the advocate will really study and know aspects of the story to share, it has to be “relevant” because no advocate of your brand is going to share a story with anyone that they think doesn’t care about the story and it has to be “authentic”, that is it has to match what the advocate already knows about or can very, very quickly learn about your brand.

Presidential candidates and WOMM

The NYT had an excellent example of this kind of effective story sharing in a recent article about small dollar donations to presidential candidates in which they took an arcane aspect of national fund raising and made it Interesting, Relevant and Authentic.

“To get a sense of scale, if Mr. Sanders’s 2.1 million donors constituted a city, the closest approximation would be to Houston, the country’s fourth-largest by population. For Mr. O’Rourke, it would be Seattle (742,000). For Ms. Warren, Honolulu (343,000). Ms. Gillibrand would be Toledo, Ohio (271,000). Ms. Harris would be Winston-Salem, N.C. (239,000). Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who entered the race at the start of February, would be Grand Forks, N.D. (56,000).

Boom!

Interesting – Rank ordered Presidential candidates by comparing their donor lists to the size of cities that people are familiar with.

Relevant – Sure, if you care about presidential politics. If not, the an advocate is probably never going to share this story with you.

Authentic – “I think I know how big Houston is (they have a pro sports teams there, people go to conventions there and astronauts talk to people there when they are in space) and I think I know how small North Dakota because people use it as an example of ‘small’.”

Remember this when you are thinking about your brand story and fashioning how it is going to be shared.